Who are the best players in virtual client computing today? Dave Grant, VMware Vice President of Product Marketing will be joined by Robert Young, Research Manager at IDC on July 28th to discuss the IDC MarketScape Report: Worldwide Virtual Client Computing Software 2015 Vendor Assessment.

Join the webcast to hear them discuss:

How mobile devices are changing the IT landscape today

The benefits of virtual client computing (VCC) that is driving adoption

Tired of having one tool to manage and monitor XenApp and another to monitor your VMware Horizon environment?

Good news! As of today—you can take advantage ofvRealize Operations for Horizonto monitor and report capabilities for both Horizon 6 AND Citrix XenApp 6.5 environments. Customers with active subscription on Horizon Enterprise, Horizon Application Management bundle and vRealize Operations for Horizon can immediately download this new feature from our download page.

Driven by strong demand from Horizon and XenApp customers, vRealize Operations for Horizon now offers a single pane of glass to monitor and report on VMware Horizon and Citrix XenApp 6.5 deployments. Reports and dashboards in vRealize Operations for Horizon will focus on end-user experience and will provide organizations with important insights into vSphere performance and the health of the underlying infrastructure. Customers will now also be able to monitor XenApp 6.5 environments including the Citrix ICA protocol with analysis on historical trends and in-guest metrics.

vRealize Operations for Horizon streamlines management, making it easier and faster than ever for IT to resolve and improve user experience. Most notably, this new offering provides:

Comprehensive visibility into the performance and health of Horizon 6 and Citrix XenApp 6.5 deployments

The coming of summer makes me think of that big truism “the only constant is change,” and its counterpart, “it’s how you handle change that matters.” When it comes to IT infrastructure, the ability to effectively manage unforeseen business shifts, seasonal peaks and valleys, and ad-hoc temporary use cases is critical.

How rapidly can you adjust? And how much will it cost you, both in financial and human resources?

Your organization wants to unleash the power of a completely mobile workforce. Your users want to hop between corporate or personal devices, access their apps, data, and desktops at any time AND work from anywhere – home, public transportation, or their favorite cafés – as easily as their desks.

Mobile Workforce: Works from Anywhere

In IT, you want to reduce the risks of thousands – if not tens of thousands – of endpoints and simplify the way you manage it all. Your organization is experiencing a growing need to enable a totally mobile workforce…but how?

Many are implementing a Software Defined Enterprise (SDE) and virtual workspaces. Virtual workspaces provide a single place for you to manage your resources, as well as a single place for your users to find the apps, data, and desktops they need no matter where they work.

Although everyone agrees on what you need, it’s harder to know how to get there. Various solution providers promise to help your company build a virtual workspace, but how do you choose the one worth the time and budget you’ll invest?

OGL is the premier provider of IT support and solutions to over 1,000 businesses throughout the UK. We pride ourselves on delivering superior services and support as customer satisfaction is our number one priority. We are constantly looking for technologies to enhance our offerings. Recently, we embarked on a journey to provide a scalable desktop service on a multi-tenant platform. We needed a platform that was flexible in provisioning new applications for our customers and their end users. And we needed to deliver desktops and applications as fast as possible inside our multi-tenant environment.

We were in good shape with our current desktop and app delivery system using Citrix, but were looking for ways to optimize our processes and lower costs. In searching for tools to help us enhance our offering, we came across CloudVolumes--now VMware App Volumes. App Volumes piqued our interest because the technology provided a real time application delivery system. We were managing many templates or “Gold Images” with Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS). If we continued to grow, the number of templates we would have to manage would also continue to grow. We also wanted to reduce the storage footprint of this platform. When we learned App Volumes could help us with these time and cost savings and support this within a multi-tenant VDI model, we were intrigued. We are still using App Volumes today and here is why.

VMware and Google have been working together over the last year to deliver compelling enterprise solutions to our customers. We have had the opportunity to work closely with Google to deliver a virtualization solution on Google’s Chromebook leveraging VMware End-User Computing products.

Many of our customers have deployed VMware Horizon and Google Chromebooks together with success to drive their businesses. A consistent question I hear from customers is, “When will Horizon hosted apps be available for Google Chromebooks?” VMware and Google have heard you, and we are excited to announce our first step to deliver hosted applications on Chromebooks. We are ready to get it into your hands.

Delivering and managing applications and users across any environment is difficult. IT has to go through a complicated process, has to use legacy solutions (and many of them at that), and is expected to deliver against an SLA that requires zero or near zero downtime. To begin this process, a tremendous amount of time and many resources are usually spent packaging applications. Then IT has to worry about delivering applications without them failing so their end users can get to what they need to as soon as they log in.

And what if that application doesn’t work with your other applications? After spending time figuring that out, you still have to deal with app updates and maintenance to stay in compliance. And what if your end users are using different virtualized environments to access their apps? At this point, you have to rely on even more solutions to manage your environments. All of this can be very tricky, time consuming, and costly.

This is where VMware can help! VMware has an approach that allows you to manage users and deliver apps in minutes. We call this Workspace Environment Management and this leverages the best of VMware’s portfolio to ensure that you can streamline the tools used to manage users, apps and polices and have one place for all of your users to go to get all of their desktops and apps every time they log in. This helps you deliver apps in seconds, eliminate app conflicts and ensures that you get a native app install experience every single time. It helps you get to zero downtime, maintain 100% compliance and also makes it easier to convert unused licenses into dollars you can use for other things.

To help you understand how you can do this—we are holding a webcast with Harry Labana and some great demos on Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 11:00 AM PDT. Here we will be sharing what’s new with Horizon 6 as well as some brand new offerings that will help you better deliver and manage apps and end users across physical, virtual and cloud-hosted environments. Whether you are using Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, VMware Horizon or haven't virtualized your desktops and apps at all — you'll want to take part.

Register to attend this webcast and learn how to:

Enjoy faster app delivery and simplify user and app management

Improve your ability to monitor your environment

Help your end users enjoy personalized, conflict-free access to all of their applications

Queen Maria Eleonora of Sweden kept her dead husband, King Gustav Adolf, in her bedroom for 18 months before he was finally interred. Microsoft retired XP April 8, 2014. Now, 8 months later, it’s time for VMware® Horizon® to accept that loss and plan a memorial.

We don’t do this lightly; we know that many customers are still using Microsoft XP. But with Microsoft dropping support, it is time for VMware to align with Microsoft’s decision. As Windows XP will not be support, there will be no drivers for new hardware, libraries that our products use will be incompatible and XP will not get the benefits of regular security fixes. For all these reasons, VMware is clearly outlining the support plan for Horizon to give our customers time to plan a transition.

Did you know that there is a newly published Reviewer’s Guide for Workspace Portal 2.1? The Reviewer’s Guide is aimed at IT professionals who are juggling the management of a wide range of applications, and an equally wide range of devices for their end users. If you are new to Workspace Portal and want to test it out, the Reviewer’s Guide can help you set up a basic, proof-of-concept deployment. To do this, you need VMware vSphere, and to test the services covered in the Reviewer’s Guide, you need VMware ThinApp, VMware Horizon With View, and Citrix XenApp deployments. Through a series of easy-to-follow exercises, the guide takes you on an exploration of some of the key capabilities of Workspace Portal. The final result is that you have hands-on experience with Workspace Portal 2.1. Continue reading →

As organizations seek to deliver greater agility in support of an increasingly mobile workforce and escalating business demands, the transformation of traditional desktop environments into mobile workspaces becomes a strategic, competitive differentiator.

Traditional approaches to desktop virtualization, often built on rigid, inflexible solution stacks,have made it difficult for organizations to quickly and efficiently size their storage, networking and compute. For many organizations, the end-result has been the over-provisioning of infrastructure to ensure available capacity and performance, making the TCO/ROI equation for desktop virtualization almost untenable for IT. These limitations typically negate the business advantage that organizations seek when embarking on a desktop transformation initiative. Well, for these customers things have just gotten a whole lot better. VMware and Dell have partnered to deliver a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that offers predictable performance with scale, faster time-to-value, and simplified management, built on VMware Horizon, with the Dell XC Web Scale Appliance architecture.

So what makes this solution better than the alternatives? VMware and Dell enjoy an extensive track record of collaborating and innovating in desktop virtualization. Dell XC hyper-converged solutions that are built on VMware uniquely benefit from:

A unified workspace for end users, that brings together virtualized desktops and apps (including Citrix XenApps), along with web and SaaS based apps, all accessible with single login, and an exceptional user experience from any device

The end result for organizations and their users is a more rapid, cost-effective, high-performance platform for transforming desktops into mobile workspaces that offer:

Predictable performance with scale, as deployments grow from small to very large, with right-sized units of infrastructure that don’t create a CAPEX hurdle each time the business needs to grow

Faster time to value, with a streamlined process, from design, to ordering, to install/provision

Simplified, unified manageability across every layer in the solution, spanning data center to end-point